"Tuesday, Google announced a few changes to Chrome, its engineered-for-speed web browser. The super-fast beta version that was announced a few weeks ago has already been updated to a stable version. For the Googlers working on Chrome, speed entails not only faster code (the latest version of Chrome boasts a 66% improvement in JavaScript performance) but also easier-to-navigate interfaces."

"The promise of HTML5's <video> tag was a simple one: to allow web pages to contain embedded video without the need for plugins. With the decision to remove support for the widespread H.264 codec from future versions of Chrome, Google has undermined this widely-anticipated feature. The company is claiming that it wants to support "open codecs" instead, and so from now on will support only two formats: its own WebM codec, and Theora.

"Net Application’s numbers for October show another loss for IE, down 0.39 points or 0.65% to 59.26%, the lowest number in, as far as we know, in at least 12 years. Firefox dropped as well, down to 22.82%, which is a 15 month low for Mozilla. The clear winner in October was Google, which saw its Chrome browser blow past the 8% barrier and landed at 8.47%, a gain of 0.49 points or 6.14% over September.

"Our readers enjoy our browser market share stories, but sometimes complain in the comments that we don't do enough to compare the actual browsers. We've therefore decided to do some performance tests for the top five browsers (stable and beta versions) on Windows. This is not meant to be an exhaustive performance rundown, as we have not tried every test in existence nor did we run them on every browser for Windows.

"We were able to test Firefox 4.0 Beta 5 performance on a 13-inch Macbook running OS X 10.6.4 with an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.83GHz CPU and 2GB DDR2 667MHz memory. Unfortunately, the browser is doing worse than it has in previous benchmarks, and it still faces a tough uphill performance challenge in order to catch up to the likes of Google Chrome 6 Beta and Safari 5.0.2." | more

"Google on Wednesday released Chrome 6.0.472.33 to its Beta Channel for Mac, Linux, and Windows.

The new beta version introduces a streamlined user interface, with a more refined upper toolbar and Omnibox, and options gathered into a single menu. These changes have been available on the Developer Channel since June.

The updated Chrome beta also adds a capability seen in other browsers called Autofill, which fills in Web forms automatically with commonly entered data fields such as name, address, phone number, and credit card number.

Here in Aarhus, Denmark -- home of the V8 project, Chrome’s JavaScript engine -- we’ve been tuning, testing, and polishing the V8 engine to give Chrome a hefty boost in speed.

Today’s new beta release incorporates one of Chrome’s most significant speed and performance increases to date, with 30% and 35% improvement on the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks over the previous beta channel release. In fact, looking back in time, Chrome’s performance has improved by as much as 213% and 305% on these two benchmarks since our very first beta.